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JIllian Lauren

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It’s National Adoption Day. I appreciate the motivation to reflect on adoption- both as an adoptee and an adoptive mom. Adoption is such a big piece of my story. Adoption is complicated and messy and flawed and confusing. It’s the source of some of my greatest joy as well as my greatest pain. I am grateful and amazed every day at what it’s brought to my life.

In somewhat-adoption-related news around here, we did wind up getting booted out of that pre-school. But I’m kind of grateful for that, too, because it wasn’t the right fit for T. And it really forced me to go back to basics with what I know about T’s early childhood trauma and the resulting behaviors. I picked up Heather Forbes’ Beyond Consequences again (THE book as far as we’re concerned), got some counseling and am planning to head to our local pre-school on Monday to start the process of applying for an IEP.

I’d also like to share a therapeutic thing I’ve been doing with T, because I feel like it’s working beautifully. Our counselor suggested that I hold T like a baby and (if possible) make eye contact, to try to dial the attachment/connection clock back a bit. The eye contact isn’t happening so often, but we do sit there for long stretches of time while I rock him- maybe the longest I’ve ever seen him sit still. In just a few days, he’s actually coming to me sometimes and asking to “snuggle” when he starts to get dysregulated. It’s awesome. I’m not sure who gets more healing out of it- T or me.

Also, on National Adoption Day, I’d like to point you toward an old post from my bud Kristen Howerton over at Rage Against the Minivan. Adoption isn’t a solution to the world orphan crisis. Here are some things that might be.

6 thoughts on “National Adoption Day”

Every time a child is adopted, his/her original birth certificate (the child’s truthful documentation of birth) is permanently sealed. He/she is issued a falsified birth certificate called an “amended birth certificate” that lists the adoptive parents as the child’s biological parents. This falsifying of an innocent, voiceless child’s birth record is discrimination and should be illegal. Do the children know they will NEVER be allowed to possess their truthful birth certificates? Average Joe’s serve hard time in federal prison for falsifying identity documents, yet it is done legally all over this country in vital records’ offices with the permission of judges and barbaric, antiquated state laws.

I think that you just copied and pasted this comment and didn’t even have the courtesy to read my blog post. This certainly isn’t true for my son. We have his records and his history lovingly and mindfully preserved for him. But I’m going to approve the comment anyway, just to be democratic.

Your comment is just plain wrong. Open adoptions happen all the time. And I’m not at all clear on your use of the word “discrimination.”

Like Jillian, I’m an adoptive parent. Also like Jillian, every record we have is being preserved for our child. In our case, our daughter’s birth mother showed up at a local hospital, announced she was going to have a baby, and that she was going to leave without a baby. She made the decision to have the record closed. Though my wife and I were just down the hall at the hospital, she chose not to meet us, and she does not want our daughter looking her up in the future. I’d like it if she would change her mind, in case my daughter is curious, but that’s not my decision to make. And it wasn’t the state’s, either.

I recently listened to your podcast on for crying out loud. Great! I started to read your blog and although I’m adopted, this comment isn’t really about that wonderful blessing. I am also a mom to a daughter with a rare chromosome disorder. In my research to find therapies and equipment to help her develop fully, I came across a product called theratogs. I have not used them, but reading about how T is starting to like hugging and other things you mentioned made me think about theratogs and how it is also supposed to be helpful to kids who have sensory needs by providing hugging type feelings which calm them (like at school when you can’t give him a hug yourself). Maybe it’s not something you’d be interested in, but I thought I’d mention it.

READER'S GUIDE

I Tell Stories

Family Roots December 9, 2014
A woman finds an unexpected new family when she adopts a son, a bad soldier learns to write from personal loss, and a man is working at a nuclear power plant when disaster strikes.http://themoth.org/posts/episodes/1425

Jillian Lauren is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, Some Girls: My Life in a Harem and the novel, Pretty, both published by Plume/Penguin. Some Girls has been translated into seventeen different languages. Her next memoir, Everything You Ever Wanted, is coming out from Plume in 2014.

Jillian has an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Magazine and Salon.com among others and has been anthologized widely, including in The Moth Anthology, True Tales of Lust and Love and Best of Babble Blogs.

She has performed at spoken word and storytelling events across the country, including being a regular on The Moth mainstage, and has been interviewed on such television programs as The View, Good Morning America and Howard Stern.

She is a popular and sometimes controversial blogger at MSNBC, The Huffington Post and Jillianlauren.com, which was named a Top 100 Mom Blog of 2012 by Babble Magazine.

Jillian is married to Weezer bass player Scott Shriner. They live in Los Angeles with their two sons.